Hard work, not genes, produces top scores

Students who do poorly in high school math assume their higher-scoring peers have a genetic ability for math when these students are just better prepared, say Miles Kimball and Noah Smith in The Atlantic. This assumption causes low achievers to give up when it’s actually hard work and not genetic ability that has the biggest effect on grades, and those who believe they can makes themselves smarter through hard work will work harder and get higher grades, they say.

I was a math teacher and tutor for a number of years and I’m absolutely flabbergasted that the authors of the referenced article didn’t even mention the quality of teaching as an important factor in student achievement in math. In fact I would say that in most cases in any given math course a student’s innate math ability, preparedness from past math courses taken, and the quality of the teacher are much more important factors than hard work on the part of the student or parent involvement. In fact for a short period of time I assisted in evaluating teacher preparedness to teach math in grades 1-6 and was really shocked at how poorly prepared about 50% of the teachers were.